Thursday, September 01, 2011

Error Report

Did you see this last night? It's a screen capture of Wakefield handing the plaque to somebody from NESN in a ceremony before the game. The 2011 Jimmy Fund Award was given by the Red Sox to NESN. Notice anything wrong? Here's a closer look:

Old logo! Harder to tell when it's not in color, but the "BOSTON" is clearly in the old, now-officially extinct font. We may have a new worst example of this error. The Red Sox themselves, in awarding a network they partially own for doing the best work toward the charity they're most closely affiliated with, etched the wrong version of their own logo in stone. "How am I supposed to sign the card now, Costanza, it's under glass!" It's one thing for me to have to tell Ford or the Boston Herald or your grandma that they should have known the Red Sox changed their logo in 2008 along with the road uniforms, held a press conference and said in the corresponding press release

The "Circle Sox" logo was further distilled and now the words "BOSTON" and "RED SOX" are in red and appear in the same font as the lettering on the team uniforms. Some additional graphic adjustments were made to the width of the outer circle and the interior baseball to clarify and refine the image.

but it's another thing for the team itself not to be aware of this almost three years later.

Oy.

Onto another one of my pet peeves. It seems like every time a Sox-Yanks series starts up, some fool somewhere (or all of them) will say "the rivalry is dead." And I'm always in such shock because I don't know why this would even be suggested. I can't even figure out the motive--is it just the classic case of people looking for a story when there isn't one? I'm not going to go through, for the millionth time, all the reasons that it's always a special event when the two teams play. I'll just say that every time they play, someone says the rivalry's dead, I tell them they're wrong...and then some incident happens on the field and while I'm out of my seat all fired up ready to run on the field and start physically attacking Yankee players, I imagine the people who wrote their articles going "oh right, THIS is why this rivalry is so completely alive as ever, why do I keep forgetting over and over??"

The worst part is, the media is able to brainwash themselves with this shit! Don Orsillo came right out and said, talking about the Cervelli thing, that "for a couple years, nothing was going on," and Heidi Watney noted that the rivalry just got "turned up a notch" as if it had ever been turned down. Nothing was going on? Did you ever see Adaptation? There was a scene where the Charlie Kaufman character tells the teacher at a screenwriting seminar that he wants his movie to have nothing happen in it, just like in the real world. And the guy says, "Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind?" and proceeds to tear him a new one. Well that's how I feel every time somebody casually acts like "nothing's happening" in the greatest rivalry in sports history. It's amazing how if a buzz phrase is going around, people will repeat it (often as if they think they were the first to think of it) as if it were fact when it could be complete bullshit. It's more amazing that the announcers who see every single game can be fooled by it, too. The next series is later this month. And just like in Groundhog Day, I'll have to start from scratch trying to win over the girl, knowing that she will have forgotten everything I'd done the last time.

I have asked team historian Dick Bresciani his thoughts on the most unnoticed logo change of all-time, and he did not write back. (He has written me back I think every other time I've asked him something.) Other than that I haven't said anything to anyone if you don't count my blog posts.

Recently I wrote about how Ford still used the old, and they changed it on their ads shortly after, so I wonder if somebody at Ford actually saw my post.

One game I went to recently I noticed that the honor guard out on the field for the National Anthem had the American flag, Massachusetts flag, and.... a Red Sox old-logo flag. They probably have it out there all the time and I just never noticed. Also the tags they stick on people's bags as they enter the park have the old logo. They're just printed in black, but like the plaque you can tell by the silhouette of the font they use for Boston.

I mock the Devil Rays because (among other reasons) they went and changed their name and then blame everyone else for saying it "wrong", but when I bought tickets to their spring training place a couple of years ago it showed up on my credit card statement as Devil Rays Ticketing. The Red Sox are basically doing the same thing with their logo. They should just change it back... I like the old one better anyway.